Stuart Hall's Encoding/Decoding model

1. Media Studies tends to focus on one of three key areas.

1.Institution
This is who produces the text and why, these people are the encoders. Factors contributing to the encoder’s product are social factors such as religion or race and also their available budget; these will all have an effect of the finished media product.

2.Content
This is where we study the Media Text itself. We can explore different areas of the text such as Genre forms and conventions, representation or narrative.

3.Audience
This is where we look at who the audience are, these are the decoder’s; we look at the impact the text has on them and their taken meaning from the text.

2 All those who make media texts can be referred to as encoders. Encoders create meaning. When they produce a media text, they do this with an assumption of how the text will be understood by the audience.

3 The audience all take meaning out of a text. When we watch a film or listen to music we decode the meaning. We try and understand what the encoder is trying to communicate. We can therefore refer to the audience as decoders.

4 signs are polysemic, which in turn means all media texts are polysemic. We are all individuals and have different life experiences so we must therefore decode media texts in different ways. Stuart hall suggests there are 4 ways in which Media Texts are decoded by audiences. We can say that the audience can decode a text in one of the following ways.

4 Decoding readings:•Dominant reading: the decoder fully shares the text’s meaning and accepts and reproduces the preferred reading.

•Negotiated reading: the decoder partly shares the text’s meaning and broadly accepts the dominant reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way that reflects their own position, experiences, and interests.
•Oppositional reading: the decoder is in a social situation that places him or her in direct opposition to the dominant meaning. The reader understands the dominant reading but does not share the text’s meaning and rejects the reading.
•Aberrant reading: the reader is unable to take the meaning that the encoder put into the text. There is a dissonance between the cultural assumptions of the encoder and the cultural context of the decoder. Meaning that the decoder just doesn’t get it.

5 Media Producers (encoders) will often want their audience to take the dominant reading. To ensure a text is less polysemic and less open to multiple meanings they may try and anchor meaning.

6 Encoders need to talk to their audience in the appropriate way. This is the Mode of Address. Generally encoders will make assumptions about the decoders’ knowledge, interests and understanding of the world and encode their texts accordingly. Those assumptions are cultural and can have an impact upon the audience. For example a young girl’s magazine may be written by men, who don’t know what young girls want so they try to empathise with them, but the encoder is giving the decoder what they think they want, without actually knowing.

7 The assumed language and points of reference an encoder uses to connect with an assumed target audience is known as the ‘Public Idiom.’